heliophobia by Saba Syed Razvi

$19.99

 

 

Saba Syed Razvi offers her readers a mature, altogether consummate collection in heliophobia.

These deftly written poems are a bold combination of freedom and constraint. The poems follow Nereid on the verge of death “stretched too thin, high / and pushed higher, carrying / in offering this disk of pearl” to the Muse (for Anais Nin) whose “feet touch down as fallen eyes / drop, shatter with each step & leave / the icicle sound of blue glass, / laughter hanging the fog behind shadows.” Syed Razvi gives a unique picture of the beauty among the wreckage through these thoughtfully honed poems.
~ Leah Maines, Publisher, Finishing Line Press

 

heliophobia, a collection of poems, opens with a Nereid on the verge of death, closes somewhere between the orgiastic rapture of a rave and an ecstatic experience of midnight meditation, and pivots on conflicting cultural perspectives – one embracing in revelry the tangible darkness of the night and the other racing in fear from beneath its shadow toward the light. The book provides a space in which culture, myth, and archetype can reconfigure their manifestations, allowing Goya, Houdini, Kali, Anais Nin, Pessoa, Emily Dickinson, Freud and the Mad Hatter to cast their selves throughout the moving circles in a shadowy cast of characters across time and continents. As the poems make their way through dream images, ideologies, and reinventions, the foremost question becomes that of the center and where it is, whether it can be reached, or if it even is. A resulting whirl propels the reader through goth-rock refrains and mantric prayers, incantations and phantom confessions, into an underground freefall exploring the textures of shadow and the consequences of light.

 

 

Description

heliophobia

by Saba Syed Razvi

$19.99, Full-length, paper

Saba Syed Razvi is the author of In the Crocodile Gardens (Agape Editions), Of the Divining and the Dead (Finishing Line Press), and the forthcoming Beside the Muezzin’s Call & Beyond the Harem’s Veil (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Offending Adam, Diner, TheTHE Poetry Blog’s Infoxicated Corner, The Homestead Review, NonBinary Review, 10×3 plus, 13th Warrior Review, The Arbor Vitae Review, and Arsenic Lobster, among others, as well as in anthologies such as Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War Faith and Sexuality, The Loudest Voice Anthology, The Liddell Book of Poetry, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity. Her poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net Award, the Rhysling Award, and have won a 2015 Independent Best American Poetry Award. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in Victoria, TX, where in addition to working on scholarly research on interfaces between Science and contemporary Poetry, she is studying Sufi Poetry in translation, and writing new poems and fiction. She is available for readings, roundtables on craft, guest lectures in classes, meetings with book-clubs, and microworkshops; if she can’t manage the travel in a particular case, she is available through online video-calls.

 

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